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The sun has been relatively quiet, and this is the first X-flare of 2015. It caused a brief radio blackout at some frequencies. Possible aurora alert ahead.

A strong Earth-directed X-flare erupted from a large active region on the sun – AR2297 – earlier today. The flare happened on March 11, 2015 at 16:22 UTC (11:22 a.m. CDT). It measured X2 on the Richter Scale of Flares. Spaceweather.com said:

Extreme ultraviolet radiation from the explosion ionized the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere, causing HF radio fade-outs and other propagation effects on the dayside of our planet. In the red zone of this map, ham radio operators and mariners may have noticed brief but complete blackout conditions at frequencies below 10 MHz.

The disturbance has since subsided.

Spaceweather.com also said that natural radio emissions from the sun indicate a possible coronal mass ejection – CME – emerging from the blast site at speeds exceeding

Our little planet faces many poorly understood perils from beyond

Considering the dangers lurking out there, it’s a wonder that our little planet is not in the firing line more often. We are just 150 million kilometres from a star that, while mostly well-behaved, occasionally has temper tantrums that could bring our civilization to its knees. Our solar system is home to a swarm of comets, rocks, boulders and flying mountains, tens of thousands of which are big enough to wipe out anything from a small city to the entire biosphere. And further out lurk delinquent stars whose death explosions are the largest since the Big Bang. If one of these went off nearby, it would be curtains for all of us.

In fact, Earth can be considered rather lucky to have not suffered a total cataclysm in at least 3.5 billion years – the period during which we have an unbroken record of life existing on the Earth’s surface. Before then, global sterilization events, caused by collisions with huge space rocks, almost Read more…

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WASHINGTON – The White House, along with the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, say that some 679 widespread power outages over the past 10 years have been due to the effects of severe weather on the U.S. electrical grid system.

The White House report, titled the “Economic Benefits of Increasing Electric Grid Resilience to Weather Outages,” said the cost of outages take various forms such as lost output and wages, spoiled inventory, delayed production, inconvenience and damage to the electric grid.

But left unaddressed is the potential impact that an electromagnetic pulse event would have.

In a just-published 28-page report, the White House said that severe weather has been the leading cause of power outages in the United States between 2003 and 2012, costing the U.S. economy up to $33 billion.

The report pointed out that the resilience of the U.S. electric grid system is integral to Read more…

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WASHINGTON – The sun is about to flip its magnetic field, at the peak of its 11-year solar cycle or at the half-way point of what scientists call a solar maximum – when it is at its most violent in terms of solar flares and the Earth is most vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse.

That’s the surge of sun energy that scientists say could in an instant return the developed world to an agrarian society, essentially without any electronics, and leave millions dead.

This mid-way point is expected in about four months – a December/January time frame – putting Earth in a position of greatest vulnerability even as the solar maximum diminishes well into 2014.

Scientists for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, have said the sun will reach its most intense period this year and well into next.

Others have suggested that even until 2020 Earth still could be exposed to solar flares that if they hit Earth directly could knock out the U.S. national grid system and fry electronic components and automated control systems not only in the U.S. but in other industrialized countries.

“It looks like we’re no more than three to four months away from a complete Read more…

MOSCOW, Russia – Edward Snowden, hacker-fugitive and former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, revealed Tuesday that a series of solar flares is set to occur in September, killing hundreds of millions of people. Documents provided by Snowden prove that, as of 14 years ago, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) remote viewers knew that the event was inevitable. Ever since, the world’s governments have quietly been trying to prepare for the sweeping global famine to result.

Speaking from his room at Sheremetyevo Airport’s Hotel Novotel, Snowden revealed that government preparations for September’s catastrophic solar flares have been “to only limited avail.” The flares’ results, he said, are known casually throughout the global intelligence community as “the killshot.”

Remote viewers employed by the CIA’s Project Stargate use their ability to perceive geographically and chronologically distant events to protect America. Since 1999 they have known about Read more…